Mechanical stresses are known to play a role in charge carrier mobility which affects Voltage threshold and drive current (Id). The effect of induced strain in a channel region of a CMOS device by mechanical stresses affects several critical device performance characteristics including drive current (Id) and particularly drive current saturation levels (IDsat), believed to be related to alteration in charge carrier mobilities caused by complex physical processes such as acoustic and optical phonon scattering.
Biaxial in-plane tensile strain induced by Si/SiGe lattice mismatch has been successfully introduced for both bulk silicon and silicon on insulator (SOI) CMOS devices. However, several shortcomings are associated with this approach including issues such as cost and process integration issues related to scalability and acceptable manufacture and performance of conventional structures such as shallow trench isolation (STI) structures.
On the other hand, conventional bulk silicon CMOS manufacturing processes are known to introduce stress into the CMOS device channel region, and such stress enhancement becomes more effective as device sizes decrease. For example, stress is typically introduced into the channel region by formation of an overlying polysilicon gate structure including offset spacers and silicide formation processes. One problem with conventional stress inducing processes, however, is related to ion implantation and annealing processes following formation of the gate structure which typically alter the stresses introduced by previous processes, frequently causing stress relaxation and degrading device performance. Prior art attempts to increase stresses by high levels of ion implantation into the gate electrode structure, for example prior to spacer formation have the shortcoming of causing damage to the gate dielectric thereby degrading CMOS device stability and reliability.
Prior art processes have also attempted to introduce mechanical stresses into the channel region by forming a stressed contact etching stop layer over the polysilicon gate structure including offset spacers. In this approach, the degree of stress induced in the channel region is limited by the size of the offset spacer which is dictated by design requirements of source/drain formation. For example the offset spacers act as a buffer between the stressed contact etching stop layer and the channel region, limiting the degree of stress which can be introduced into the channel region. Other problems with prior art channel stressing techniques include the opposing effects of the type of stress introduced on NMOS and PMOS devices. For example, tensile stress introduction into the channel region improves NMOS performance while degrading PMOS performance, while compressive stress has the opposite effect. As a result, unacceptable trade-offs between NMOS and PMOS performances are frequently required in prior art stress inducing techniques.
Some efforts in the prior art that have been proposed to overcome the device degradation of a CMOS of opposite polarity have included ion implanting the contact etching stop layer overlying the opposite polarity device with Ge ions to relax the stress in the contact etch stop layer. For example, nitride contact etch stop layers of the prior art have been formed with a relatively high level of tensile stress requiring a high level of ion implantation to relax the stress of selected polarity devices. As a result, the nitride contact etching stop layer is severely damaged, which can have the effect of undesirably changing etching rates and causing unintentional overetching in subsequent processes, for example causing damage to underlying silicon or polysilicon portions of a CMOS device, thereby degrading device performance and reliability.
These and other shortcomings demonstrate a need in the semiconductor device integrated circuit manufacturing art for improved CMOS devices and manufacturing methods to enhance and improve local mechanical stress levels introduced into CMOS device channel regions to improve device performance and reliability.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide improved CMOS devices and manufacturing methods to enhance and improve local mechanical stress levels introduced into CMOS device channel regions to improve device performance and reliability, in addition to overcoming other shortcomings of the prior art.